The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Couldn’t be better, I gather. He’s having a wonderful time. You know how happy he always was there. And with the new government! Well, you can imagine.”

  “And mother?”

  “Still in London. She has a house to herself in West Hampstead. Don’t ask me how. She’s installed the latest EE generators and energy storers. She’s got a TV set, a pet option and a gas licence. You know mother. She’s always had the right contacts. She’ll be glad to know you’re OK.”

  “Yes. That’s good, too. I’ve been guilty of some awfully selfish behaviour, haven’t I? Well, I’m putting all that behind me and getting on with my life.”

  “You sound as if you’ve seen someone. About whatever it was. Have you been ill, Bea?”

  “Oh, no. No. Not really.” She turned to reassure me with a quick smile and a hand out to mine, just as always. I nearly sang with relief. “Emotional trouble, you know.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. Anyway, it’s over.”

  “All the hippies told me you’d been abducted by a flying saucer!”

  “Did they?”

  I recognised her brave smile. “What’s wrong? I hadn’t meant to be tactless.”

  “You weren’t. There are so many strange things happening around here. You can’t blame people for getting superstitious, can you? After all, we say we’ve identified the causes, yet can do virtually nothing to find a cure.”

  “Well, I must admit there’s some truth in that. But there are still things we can do.”

  “Of course there are. I didn’t mean to be pessimistic, old Paul.” She punched me on the arm and told the driver to let his horse trot for a bit, to get us some air on our faces, since the wind had dropped so suddenly.

  She told me she would come to see me at the same time tomorrow and perhaps after that we might go to her new flat. It was only a temporary place while she made up her mind. Why didn’t I just go to her there? I said. Because, she said, it was in a maze. You couldn’t get a calash through and even the schoolboys would sometimes mislead you by accident. Write it down, I suggested, but she refused with an even broader smile. “You’ll see I’m right. I’ll take you there tomorrow. There’s no mystery. Nothing deliberate.”

  I went back into the damp, semi-darkness of the Osiris and climbed through black archways to my rooms.

  13 You’ll Find No Mirrors In That Cold Abode

  I had meant to ask Beatrice about her experience with the Somali woman and the police, but her mood had swung so radically I had decided to keep the rest of the conversation as casual as possible. I went to bed at once more hopeful and more baffled than I had been before I left Cairo.

  In the morning I took a cab to the religious academy, or madrassah, of the famous Sufi, El Haj Sheik Ibrahim Abu Halil, not because I now needed his help in finding my sister, but because I felt it would have been rude to cancel my visit without explanation. The madrassah was out near the old obelisk quarries. Characteristically Moslem, with a tower and a domed mosque, it was reached on foot or by donkey, up a winding, artificial track that had been there for at least two thousand years. I climbed to the top, feeling a little dizzy as I avoided looking directly down into the ancient quarry and saw that the place was built as a series of stone colonnades around a great courtyard with a fountain in it. The fountain, in accordance with the law, was silent.

  The place was larger than I had expected and far more casual. People, many obviously drugged, of every age and race sat in groups or strolled around the cloisters. I asked a pale young woman in an Islamic burqa where I might find Sheikh Abu Halil. She told me to go to the office and led me as far as a glass door through which I saw an ordinary business layout of pens and paper, mechanical typewriters, acoustic calculators and, impressively, an EMARGY console. I felt as if I were prying. My first job, from which I had resigned, was as an Energy Officer. Essentially the work involved too much peeping-tomism and too little real progress.

  A young black man in flared Mouwes and an Afghan jerkin signalled for me to enter. I told him my business and he said, “No problem, man.” He asked me to wait in a little room furnished like something still found in any South London dentist’s. Even the magazines looked familiar and I did not intend to waste my battery ration plugging in to one. A few minutes later the young man returned and I was escorted through antiseptic corridors to the Sufi’s inner sanctum.

  I had expected some rather austere sort of Holy Roller’s Executive Suite, and was a trifle shocked by the actuality which resembled a scene from The Arabian Nights. The Sufi was clearly not celibate, and was an epicurean rather than an aescetic. He was also younger than I had expected. I guessed he was no more than forty-five. Dressed in red silks of a dozen shades, with a massive scarlet turban on his head, he lay on cushions smoking from a silver and brass hookah while behind him on rich, spangled divans, lolled half-a-dozen young women, all of them veiled, all looking at me with frank, if discreet, interest. I felt as if I should apologise for intruding on someone’s private sexual fantasy, but the Sufi grinned, beckoned me in, then fell to laughing aloud as he stared into my face. All this, of course, only increased my discomfort. I could see no reason for his amusement.

  “You think this a banal piece of play-acting?” He at once became solicitious. “Pardon me, Herr Doktor. I misunderstood your expression for a moment. I thought you were an old friend.” Now he was almost grave. “How can I help you?”

  “Originally,” I said, “I was looking for my sister Beatrice. I believe you know her.” Was this my sister’s secret? Had she involved herself with a charismatic charlatan to whom even I felt drawn? But the banality of it all! True madness, like true evil, I had been informed once, was always characterised by its banality.

  “That’s it, of course. Bea Porcupine was the name the young ones used. She is a very good friend of mine. Are you looking for her no longer, Dr Porcupine?”

  I pointed out that Pappenheim was the family name. The hippies had not made an enormously imaginative leap.

  “Oh, the children! Don’t they love to play? They are blessed. Think how few of us in the world are allowed by God to play.”

  “Thou art most tolerant indeed, sidhi.” I used my best classical Arabic, at which he gave me a look of considerable approval and addressed me in the same way.

  “Doth God not teach us to tolerate, but not to imitate, all the ways of mankind? Are we to judge God, my compatriot?” He had done me the honour, in his own eyes, of addressing me as a coreligionist. When he smiled again his expression was one of benign happiness. “Would you care for some coffee?” he asked in educated English. “Some cakes and so on? Yes, of course.” And he clapped his hands, whispering instructions to the nearest woman who rose and left. I was so thoroughly discomforted by this outrageously old-fashioned sexism which, whatever their private practices, few sophisticated modern Arabs were willing to admit to, that I remained silent.

  “And I trust that you in turn will tolerate my stupid self-indulgence,” he said. “It is a whim of mine—and these young women—to lead the life of Haroun-el-Raschid, eh? Or the great chiefs who ruled in the days before the Prophet. We are all nostalgic for that, in Egypt. The past, you know, is our only escape. You don’t begrudge it us, do you?”

  I shook my head, although by training and temperament I could find no merit in his argument. “These are changing times,” I said. “Your past is crumbling away. It’s difficult to tell good from evil or right from wrong, let alone shades of intellectual preference.”

  “But I can tell you really do still think there are mechanical solutions to our ills.”

  “Don’t you, sidhi?”

  “I do. I doubt though that they’re much like a medical man’s.”

  “I’m an engineer, not a doctor of medicine.”

  “Pardon me. It’s my day for gaffs, eh? But we’re all guilty of making the wrong assumptions sometimes. Let us open the shutters and enjoy some fresh air.” Another of the women wen
t to fold back the tall wooden blinds and let shafts of sudden sunlight down upon the maroons, burgundies, dark pinks, bottle-greens and royal blues of that luxurious room. The women sank into the shadows and only Sheik Abu Halil remained with half his face in light, the other in shade, puffing on his pipe, his silks rippling as he moved a lazy hand. “We are blessed with a marvellous view.”

  From where we sat it was possible to see the Nile, with its white sails and flanking palms, on the far side of an expanse of glaring granite.

  “My sister—” I began.

  “A remarkable woman. A saint, without doubt. We have tried to help her, you know.”

  “I believe you’re responsible for getting her out of police custody, sidhi.”

  “God has chosen her and has blessed her with unusual gifts. Dr Pappenheim, we are merely God’s instruments. She has brought a little relief to the sick, a little consolation to the despairing.”

  “She’s coming home with me. In three days.”

  “A great loss for Aswan. But perhaps she’s more needed out there. Such sadness, you know. Such deep sadness.” I was not sure if he described my sister or the whole world. “In Islam, you see,” an ironic twitch of the lip, “we share our despair. It is a democracy of misery.” And he chuckled. “This is blasphemy I know, in the West. Especially in America.”

  “Well, in parts of the North maybe.” I smiled. My father was from Mississippi and settled first in Morocco, then in England after he came out of the service. He said he missed the old, bitter-sweet character of the U.S. South. The New South, optimistic and, in his view, Yankified, no longer felt like home. He was more in his element in pre-Thatcher Britain. When she, too, began a programme of “Yankification” of her own he retreated into fantasy, leaving my mother and going to live in a working class street in a run-down North Eastern town where he joined the Communist Party and demonstrated against closures in the mining, fishing and steel industries. My mother hated it when his name appeared in the papers or, worse in her view, when he wrote intemperate letters to the weekly journals or the heavy dailies. But Pappenheim was a contributor to Marxism Today and, later, Red is Green during his brief flirtation with Trotskyist Conservationism. He gave that up for anarcho-socialism and disappeared completely into the world of the abstract. He now wrote me letters describing the “Moroccan experiment” as the greatest example of genuinely radical politics in action. I had never completely escaped the tyranny of his impossible ideals. This came back to me, there and then, perhaps because in some strange way I found this sufi as charming as I had once found my father. “We say that misery loves company. Is that the same thing?” I felt I was in some kind of awful contest. “Is that why she wanted to stay with you?”

  “I knew her slightly before it all changed for her. Afterwards, I knew her better. She seemed very delicate. She came back to Aswan, then went out to the dig a couple more times, then back here. She was possessed of a terrible restlessness she would allow nobody here to address and which she consistently denied. She carried a burden, Dr Pappenheim.” He echoed the words of Inspector el-Bayoumi. “But perhaps we, even we, shall never know what it was.”

  14 On Every Hand—The Red Collusive Stain

  She arrived at the Osiris only a minute or two late. She wore a one-piece worksuit and a kind of bush-hat with a veil. She also carried a briefcase which she displayed in some embarrassment. “Habit, I suppose. I don’t need the maps or the notes. I’m taking you into the desert, Paul. Is that OK?”

  “We’re not going to your place?”

  “Not now.”

  I changed into more suitable clothes and followed her down to the street. She had a calash waiting which took us to the edge of town, to a camel camp where, much to my dismay, we transferred to grumbling dromedaries. I had not ridden a camel for ten years, but mine proved fairly tractable once we were moving out over the sand.

  I had forgotten the peace and the wonderful smell of the desert and it was not long before I had ceased to pay attention to the heat or the motion and had begun to enjoy a mesmeric panorama of dunes and old rock. My sister occasionally used a compass to keep course but sat her high saddle with the confidence of a seasoned drover. We picked up speed until the heat became too intense and we rested under an outcrop of red stone which offered the only shade. It was almost impossible to predict where one would find shade in the desert. A year ago this rock might have been completely invisible beneath the sand; in a few months it might be invisible again.

  “The silence is seductive,” I said after a while.

  My sister smiled. “Well, it whispers to me, these days. But it is wonderful, isn’t it? Here you have nothing but yourself, a chance to discover how much of your identity is your own and how much is actually society’s. And the ego drifts away. One becomes a virgin beast.”

  “Indeed!” I found this a little too fanciful for me. “I’m just glad to be away from all that…”

  “You’re not nervous?”

  “Of the desert?”

  “Of getting lost. Nothing comes out here, ever, now. Nomads don’t pass by and it’s been years since a motor vehicle or plane was allowed to waste its ER on mere curiosity. If we died, we’d probably never be found.”

  “This is a bit morbid, isn’t it, Bea? It’s only a few hours from Aswan, and the camels are healthy.”

  “Yes.” She rose to put our food and water back into their saddlebags, causing a murmuring and an irritable shifting of the camels. We slept for a couple of hours. Bea wanted to be able to travel at night, when we would make better time under the almost full moon.

  The desert at night will usually fill with the noises of the creatures who waken as soon as the sun is down, but the region we next entered seemed as lifeless as the Bical flats, though without their aching mood of desolation. The sand still rose around our camels’ feet in silvery gasps and I wrapped myself in the other heavy woollen gelabea Beatrice had brought. We slept again, for two or three hours, before continuing on until it was almost dawn and the moon faint and fading in the sky.

  “We used to have a gramophone and everything,” she said. “We played those French songs mainly. The old ones. And a lot of classic Rai. It was a local collection someone had bought with the machine. You wouldn’t believe the mood of camaraderie that was here, Paul. Like Woodstock must have been. We had quite a few young people with us—Egyptian and European mostly—and they all said the same. We felt privileged.”

  “When did you start treating the sick?” I asked her.

  “Treating? Scarcely that! I just helped out with my First Aid kit and whatever I could scrounge from a pharmacy. Most of the problems were easily treated, but not priorities as far as the hospitals are concerned. I did what I could whenever I was in Aswan. But the kits gradually got used and nothing more was sent. After the quake, things began to run down. The Burbank Foundation needed its resources for rebuilding at home.”

  “But you still do it. Sometimes. You’re a legend back there. Ben Achmet told me.”

  “When I can, I help those nomads cure themselves, that’s all. I was coming out here a lot. Then there was some trouble with the police.”

  “They stopped you? Because of the Somali woman?”

  “That didn’t stop me.” She raised herself in her saddle suddenly. “Look. Can you see the roof there? And the pillars?”

  They lay in a shallow valley between two rocky cliffs and they looked in the half-light as if they had been built that very morning. The decorated columns and the massive flat roof were touched a pinkish gold by the rising sun and I could make out hieroglyphics, the blues and ochres of the Egyptian artist. The building, or series of buildings, covered a vast area. “It’s a city,” I said. I was still disbelieving. “Or a huge temple. My God, Bea! No wonder you were knocked out by this!”

  “It’s not a city or a temple, in any sense we mean.” Though she must have seen it a hundred times, she was still admiring of the beautiful stones. “There’s nothing like it surviving anywh
ere else. No record of another. Even this is only briefly mentioned and, as always with Egyptians, dismissively as the work of earlier, less exalted leaders, in this case a monotheistic cult which attempted to set up its own God-king and, in failing, was thoroughly destroyed. Pragmatically, the winners in that contest re-dedicated the place to Sekhmet and then, for whatever reasons—probably economic—abandoned it altogether. There are none of the usual signs of later uses. By the end of Nyusere’s reign no more was heard of it at all. Indeed, not much more was heard of Nubia for a long time. This region was never exactly the centre of Egyptian life.”

  “It was a temple to Ra?”

  “Ra, or a sun deity very much like him. The priest here was represented as a servant of the sun. We call the place Onu’us, after him.”

  “Four thousand years ago? Are you sure this isn’t one of those new Dutch repros?” My joke sounded flat, even to me.

  “Now you can see why we kept it dark, Paul. It was an observatory, a scientific centre, a laboratory, a library. A sort of university, really. Even the hieroglyphics are different. They tell all kinds of things about the people and the place. And, it had a couple of other functions.” Her enthusiasm died and she stopped, dismounting from her camel and shaking sand from her hat. Together we watched the dawn come up over the glittering roof. The pillars, shadowed now, stood only a few feet out of the sand, yet the brilliance of the colour was almost unbelievable. Here was the classic language of the 5th Dynasty, spare, accurate, clean. And it was obvious that the whole place had only recently been refilled. Elsewhere churned, powdery earth and overturned rock spoke of vigorous activity by the discovering team; there was also, on the plain which stretched away from the Southern ridge, a considerable area of fused sand. But even this was now covered by that desert tide which would soon bury again and preserve this uncanny relic.

  “You tried to put the sand back?” I felt stupid and smiled at myself.

  “It’s all we could think of in the circumstances. Now it’s far less visible than it was a month ago.”